When comparing MonoGame vs BlitzMax, the Slant community recommends MonoGame for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”MonoGame is ranked 19th while BlitzMax is ranked 39th. The most important reason people chose MonoGame is:

Pro

Open source

All the code is available to you ensuring you'll have the ability to make changes when you need to or even port to whole new platforms.

Pro

Managed code

By leveraging C# and other .NET languages on Microsoft and Mono platforms you can write modern, fast, and reliable game code.

Pro

Good community

The community MonoGame has to offer is helpful and mature.

Pro

Well-known and documented API

The framework implements the XNA 4 API, so games made in XNA can be ported to other platforms using this. This was the same API used by the Xbox Live Indie Games platform so there's lots of documentation online for it.

Pro

Performance on desktop

The performance on desktop platforms matches that of C++, but you still get all the pleasant features that C# has to offer.

Pro

Multi target

You can compile on Windows, Mac and Linux. Nothing to change. There are solutions to compile on the same machine for 2 targets.

Pro

Modular

There are many modules to extend the features of the language: you can create PDF (via a Cairo module), or just download/upload files (via LibCurl), playing streaming sound (via BASS) and so on (databases, xml, xls...) User can create their own module (they could be written in plain BlitzMax)

Pro

Easy syntax

Pro

Stable language and source code

After many years the language it self is very stable. The packages contains the source code of ALL modules (excluding the source of the compiler).

Pro

Easy to start, high productivity

BlitzMax is just ready after the installation. Open the IDE, write your code and just press F5 to see the results. You don't need to install other things to use the language. Of course if you want to change the language itself - or modules - you need to install MinGW or other libs, but guidelines are provided and easy to follow.

Pro

Fast compiler

With comparison to the some of the other languages Blitzmax compiles source files fast enough.

Pro

Compiles to native code

Good performance thanks to native code on each of the target platforms.

Pro

Garbage collected language

The language is garbage collected in two modes: reference counting or using the Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector.

Pro

GUI for apps

BlitzMax provides the MaxGUI modules that allow to build GUI desktop applications for Windows, Mac and Linux (FLTK or GTK via a module). You also could create your own 'gadgets'.

Pro

Great community support

the forum is plenty of examples and solutions! Community is strong and still working, available for getting an hand

Pro

BLIde

BLIde is an integrated development environment for Blitz Max, designed to work very close to the project file management performed by BlitzMax engine.It’s inspired by the .NET IDE and some other great tools, It’s been designed for hobbyist and professional coders.

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Cons

Con

Non-Windows tools are a bit funky

Monogame support for Xamarin Studio or Monodevelop is a bit shaky especially for library references. Only good non-Windows IDE compatible with MonoGame is Rider and that costs money & isn't open-source.

Con

Outdated and abandoned

The author neglected BlitzMax and works on Monkey2.

Con

No mobile targets

Only desktop targets available: Windows, MacOS, Linux.

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